AI Chatbot Prescribing Psychiatric Medications Raises Red Flags

AI prescriptions? What’s next.

I read this and felt uneasy.
Not because AI is involved. That part is already here. It is not going away.
It is the way it is being brought into mental health that worries me.
An AI system authorising psychiatric medication refills. Being tested on real people. And it sounds like even the basic questions are still being asked. Does it work? Who is it for? Where does it fail?
That should come before rollout, not after.

What I find harder to sit with is how little some people seem to care about that.
Or maybe it is not that they do not care. Maybe it is the pull of something else.
Saving time. Saving money. Making systems run faster. Covering gaps in services that are already stretched.
I understand the pressure. I really do.

But this is where it gets risky.
Because AI is not a clinician. It does not understand a person. It does not notice the small changes, the hesitation, the tone, the things people do not say. It works on patterns, not presence.
And sometimes it will get things wrong. Not in a dramatic, obvious way. In a quiet, confident way. The kind that can slip through if no one is really watching.
That is the part that stays with me.
If this is driven by cost or convenience, without real care and proper safeguards, the impact will not be neutral. It will land on people. Real people. Some already vulnerable.

And when it goes wrong, it will not be the system that feels it.
It will be the person on the receiving end.
I am not against AI. There may be places where it helps.
But mental health is not just a process to optimise.

It is human work. It is messy, nuanced, and sometimes slow for a reason.
If we forget that, or choose to ignore it, we are taking a risk that I am not sure we fully understand yet.